No Apocalypse, No Integration

Hopenhayn Martin Hopenhayn, Tompkins Cynthia M. Tompkins, Horan Elizabeth Rosa Horan

Description

Winner of the Premio Iberoamericano Book Award in 1997 (Spanish Edition)What form does the crisis of modernity take in Latin America when societies are politically demobilized and there is no revolutionary agenda in sight? How does postmodern criticism reflect on enlightenment and utopia in a region marked by incomplete modernization, new waves of privatization, great masses of excluded peoples, and profound sociocultural heterogeneity? In No Apocalypse, No Integration Martin Hopenhayn examines the social and philosophical implications of the triumph of neoliberalism and the collapse of leftist and state-sponsored social planning in Latin America.With the failure of utopian movements that promised social change, the rupture of the link between the production of knowledge and practical intervention, and the defeat of modernization and development policy established after World War II, Latin American intellectuals and militants have been left at an impasse without a vital program of action. Hopenhayn analyzes these crises from a theoretical perspective and calls upon Latin American intellectuals to reevaluate their objects of study, their political reality, and their society's cultural production, as well as to seek within their own history the elements for a new collective discourse. Challenging the notion that strict adherence to a single paradigm of action can rescue intellectual and cultural movements, Hopenhayn advocates a course of epistemological pluralism, arguing that such an approach values respect for difference and for cultural and theoretical diversity and heterodoxy.This essay collection will appeal to readers of sociology, public policy, philosophy, cultural theory, and Latin American history and culture, as well as to those with an interest in Latin America's current transition.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Sociology
• Cultural studies
• Latin America

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 08 janvier 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822380399
• Langue: English

Extrait

No Apocalypse, No Integration

Post-ContemporaryInterventions

Series Editors: Stanley Fish and

FredricJameson

A Book in the Series

LatinAmericainTranslation

en Traducción

em Tradução

Sponsored by the Duke-

University of North Carolina

PrograminLatinAmericanStudies

R

NO APOCALYPSE, NO INTEGRATION

Modernism and Postmodernism in Latin America

Martín Hopenhayn

TranslatedbyCynthiaMargaritaTompkins

and Elizabeth Rosa Horan

Duke University Press

Durham and London 2001

∫2001 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$

Typeset in Galliard by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear

on the last printed page of this book.

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Contents

Preface to the Spanish Edition vii Preface to the English Edition xi The Day after the Death of a Revolution 1 Disenchanted and Triumphant toward the 21st Century: A Prospect of Cultural Moods in South America 13 Neither Apocalyptic nor Integrated (Eight Debatable Paradoxes) 36 Realism and Revolt, Twenty Years Later (Paris 1968–Santiago de Chile 1988) 47 What is Left Positive from Negative Thought? A Latin American Perspective 55 Postmodernism and Neoliberalism in Latin America 77 The Crisis of Legitimacy of the Planning State 94 Is the Social Thinkable without Metanarratives? 119 Utopia against Crisis, or How to Awake from a Long Insomnia Index 155

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Preface to the Spanish Edition

A thread, tough and slender, runs through the following pages. It’s not the thread of disenchantment. What I mean is that the collective dreams that gave way to the rigors of history ask the survivors not to give way, in turn, to the temptation of the usual litany. Such laments might be lucid, yet avoiding them could be the most sensible way of mourning these corpse-like histories. Despite their rubble, these histories extended much, all-too-human hope. Nor is this the thread of euphoric amnesia, which has proclaimed the end of hard times and the coming of thesoft and coolparadise. I don’t deny that it’s healthy to forget, when doing so refreshes thinking and liberates new, constructive drives. But the form in which forgetting tends to be invoked these days, in the wake of its invitation to plasticity and liberty, reeks of the consecration of injustice. The thread need be tough then, and slender, very fine, doubled, to unite these pages since the speed (and not the collapse) of the times makes the grave-digger a midwife and vice-versa. The thread needs to establish what is irrecoverable and, in a single operation, size up what can be recycled.

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No Apocalypse, No Integration

If some myths of emancipation or development seem to have shattered into a thousand pieces—as much in Latin America as in other regions— fragments of those myths will always remain. Such shards and tatters furnish part of the raw material for elaborating new collective projects. But the ambiguity doesn’t end there. Social condition and existence may seem damned by the absence of a motivating narrative, yet they are never totally deprived of hope. There is always reason to debate alternatives, be they simulacra of promise, rituals of anticipation or constructive theory. Of course social existence in this part of the world has never been easy. Indeed, it’s always been full of voluptuous nuances. Ethical complexity and expressive richness live together in our social ties, inhabiting our embraces and aggressions. This ambivalence in sociability reappears under new figures. Grassroots communities live side by side with postmodern tribes of urban youth; the expression of violence in the large cities com- bines with the call for greater participation on the part of citizens, and the demand for greater political transparency coexists with politics turned into televised spectacle or show business. The essays contained in this volume look to capture these new forms of ambiguity, to establish the breaks but above all the threads, tough and slender, that crisscross the gaps, that go through fire, not emerging intact, but not totally disintegrating either. Such is the leitmotiv here: break and re-creation in Latin American sociability. In what tones is this song sung? The reader might find the following references worthwhile in pondering the theoretical range that the follow- ing pages travel. The reevaluation and recomposition of the cultural dimension of de- velopment shows a more than anthropological, almost metaphysical re- spect for the symbolic; an unprecedented popularity of stories regarding our heterogeneity and diversity; an enthusiastic reconsideration of indige- nous, rural tradition and of furious urban rockers; a broad consensus with regard to the necessity of considering the cultural variable in development proposals and discourse. There’s a compulsive equation that identifies secular common sense with the spirit of the private. Its most disquieting symptom, complacency about the fever for economic privatization, contrasts with endogenous impulses toward communitarianism, mythic thought, moral traditional- ism, popular religiosity, and millenary customs. These premodern im- pulses are either excluded from or absorbed by privatist secularization. In the almost unanimous exaltation of political democratization as an

Preface to the Spanish Edition

ix

institutional requisite for actualizing old emancipatory ideals there is a desire, by way of democracy,open a flank where personal and group to dreams might have public visibility. This is coupled with the defense of institutional democracy as the order of ‘‘life’’ against exclusion, authoritar- ianism and the cultures of death. From the day-to-day recovery of the logic and strategies of social move- ments, grassroots organizations, counter cultures, and popular expres- sions of resistance there appears, in the end, a curiosity with regard to peripheral conditions and existence. These are no longer present as folk- lore but as the rule of partial, even tribal spaces where ideals of autonomy, participation, and the development of human potential enter into play. Amid the massive suspicion regarding great ideals appears a truly mas- sive loss of belief in large-scale projects, collective stories, and soci- etal utopias. This suspicion arises together with an urgency to counter the new waves of political pragmatism and individual cynicism, by way of illu- sions and proposals infused with new content, perhaps with greater hu- mility and fewer pretensions than the previous utopias, but not ine√ective for this. A consequence of the worldwide eruption of a rational delirium is that the speed of operations, inversions, reconversions, ramifications, renova- tions, incorporations, speculations, and tides has increased exponentially, beyond human grasp, far beyond any kind of voluntary control. Any cen- tralized e√ort at imposing order would be interpreted as suicidal. And at the same time—or as part of the same—we’re confronted with the multiplication of options for integrating or marginalizing ourselves, with software for all tastes and all perversions, and with the temptation to reconstruct ourselves (cybernetically, computationally, telecommunica- tionally) freed of the weightiness of being. It’s as if we could get rid of thinking for ourselves by devotedly or playfully appropriating technology, if we set all of our intelligence towards nourishing the euphoria of this techno-wave that can really irritate us when we’re in a bad mood. These pages observe a postmodern disenchantment with ideals such as the constitution of the subject, progress as the engine that drives history, the encyclopedic and academic tendencies of the highly literate, the ten- dency towards a kind of teleology in the social sciences, the commitment to systemic change—ultimately, everything that finished by making us ine√ective because we wanted to be absolutely consistent. The delegitimation of the State as the propeller of development and the builder of society likewise shapes these pages. With that delegitimation